Sunday, February 5, 2012

Baking with Julia: Part 1 The White Loaves

As I have mentioned in a previous post, my desire to fit in a group will be outweighing my natural urge to be a lazy bum. I need to post twice a month about my baking experience and experiments with Baking With Julia by Dorie Greenspan so I can hang out on the Internet with other bakers.

I have actually not missed the first deadline yet. Which is pretty impressive since I seem to be late at everything since I had kids.

The first recipe we baked as a group is White Loaves. I know the title and description knocks you off your feet and may actually cause drooling. After all, how often do you get to eat white bread, especially when it isn't a holiday or birthday or a leap year. (Big sarcasm here, plus it is a leap year).

Baking white loaves almost doesn't seem worth the effort. My kids take sandwiches to school multiple times a week and we fly through loaves of bread. Do they even care what bread they are eating? Isn't it just a way to transport peanut butter and jelly to school? However, making a loaf of bread from scratch changes the way any sandwich tastes.

Daughter M said that this was the only time she liked eating the crust on bread. Since the kiddies tend to bring home the crusts from their lunchboxes every day, that is high praise.

The recipe (on page 81 in the book), makes 2 loaves. Here is a link to it. Unfortunately, I am giving 1 loaf to the family that is entertaining my non-football watching child during the Super Bowl. That leaves 1 loaf for the whole family, which won't make it more that 1-2 days. I guess I could start baking bread every week.

And while telling someone about this group and recipe and blog etc. I realized that instead of adding 1/2 a stick of butter I added the whole stick. Which is probably why this bread is way more wonderful than it should be.

Enjoy the picture. This was very easy to make and might become a weekly occurrence in my house.

4 comments:

Oh Lorna, that's so something I would have done! I can't tell you how many times I've added something to a mixture only to realize the second it's in the bowl that I added too much (usually when I'm halving a recipe and forget to divide one ingredient). But I'm sure it didn't hurt your bread one bit--if your kids ate the crust, I think that's all that needs to be said. My husband and I don't have kids yet but I ate through this bread so quickly that I'm also considering making it a weekly staple. On the other hand, perhaps I shouldn't...

Nice hanging out on the internet with you! High praise indeed when the crusts don't come home, or end up hidden under napkins, fed to the dog, etc. Fun post. Looking forward to virtual baking with you!